


Shield and Spear

by goingtoalaska



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-22
Updated: 2016-11-22
Packaged: 2018-09-01 13:02:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8625418
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goingtoalaska/pseuds/goingtoalaska
Summary: Bart empties an assault rifle into Dirk at close range.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written before 1x06 aired. Once all my conjecture has been dashed to pieces on the merciless rocks of canon, you can consider this an AU.

The scrawny girl with the beyond-the-horizon eyes comes in the middle of the afternoon. 3:45 is not a particularly auspicious time for death to visit, but visit she does, wearing the bloodied remnants of what looks like a SWAT team uniform and holding an assault rifle with the same casual disinterest with which she holds everything. 

Dirk is halfway through a cup of peppermint tea. The first bullet shatters the cup. The second shatters the recently-replaced glass in the window of Todd's apartment. The rest shatter the remainder of the apartment – it gets difficult to keep count over the roar of gunfire and his own panicked yelling.

The angel of death is breathing hard when the gun runs out of ammunition. So is Dirk. Having walked towards him while firing, she's a few paces away. He draws his feet up and tucks them beneath him on the couch, as though that will help. She scans him for bullet holes. Finds none. The faraway stare gets considerably less far away.

“Hello,” Dirk says. He can hardly hear his own voice, though it feels like he's shouting – there's a high-pitched ringing in his ear.

“You're not dead.” He hears that, alright. Her voice sounds like it's squeezed itself through a bear trap to get to him.

“No. Sorry if that's inconvenient.” 

The disbelief in her eyes is focused behind him. He twists to follow her gaze – a half-dozen holes in the couch surrounding him.

“How'd I miss?”

Dirk half-smiles. Says nothing. Stands up, steps to the side, reveals another three or four holes in the fabric. They're grouped around where his heart would have been. 

“Not to worry. You're an excellent shot.”

“No,” she breathes, transfixed by the damage. “No, no, no - “ the gun's gone, dropped insignificant to the floor, and her arms are up around her head like a boxer on her last legs. 

“I'm sorry if this is a bad time, but I have about twenty-six questions?”

She's still muttering, sub-vocal now, hands around her head warding him off, face half-frozen in a rictus of something like fear. It sits wrong on her face, he notices, in the same way he notices everything. It's clearly not an expression she's ever had much time for.

“I can definitely try to hone it down to one or two, if time's a factor.”

Her eyes snap up like a pair of high beams. “You're Dirk Gently.”

“I am.”

“I gotta kill you. Killin' you is the only thing I know to be true.”

“Ah,” he says, apologetically. “Well. The thing is, killing me – is actually the only thing in the universe I believe to be truly impossible.”

They stare at each other for a long moment. There's the distant scream of a siren and the ragged girl's body seems to move with it, listing gradually to one side like a great ship making a turn. Her hands flex and grip at the open air. 

“Here's the first question,” Dirk says, gently. “What's your name?”

“Bart.” Her voice is either very small or very far away. He smiles encouragement.

“That's a very good name. Here's another question. Would you like some tea?”

Bart's eyes don't leave his face as he shuffles into the kitchen to commence the age-old tea ritual. He opts for camomile this time – the box says “soothing and calming”, and besides, peppermint now carries a distinctly bullet-ish association that he'd rather do without. When he's done, he sets the teapot and cups down on Todd's dining table, sits, then gestures helpfully at the chair opposite. The girl seems to have put down roots in the living room rug, however. Dirk ambles over to her, puts his hands on her shoulders, and steers her with a firm but friendly hand to the chair. 

He doesn't see the knife until it's a flash of whistling silver in his peripheral vision. A strangled sound of triumph wrests itself free of the girl's throat as the machete disappears to the hilt in his chest. He sighs.

“That won't work either, I'm afraid, though it was a jolly good try.”

Bart recoils from the blade as though she's been burned. It clatters to the ground, blade clean and wicked as the day it was made. Dirk picks it up for her but she dashes it from his hands, digs both fists into the matted mass of hair on her skull and screws her eyes shut. The scream that comes from her can't be human – whole body shaking, teeth bare and mouth twisted, a thing possessed, bloodstained, filthy. It doesn't sound like it should come from flesh – like sheet metal torn, like a sawblade against concrete. The kind of sound that ought to bleed. 

Dirk puts his arm around her thin shoulders and gathers her to him like a broken kite. She wrenches a deep, guttering breath into herself and howls again into his chest, wiping blood that can't belong to either of them across his jacket. This one's red. No such thing as a coincidence. She's striking at him with an unnatural amount of force, driving her fists into his shoulders and his chest, battering him around the face. Dirk holds her, not tightly enough to restrict her movements, and murmurs soothing things to her. When he runs out of soothing things to murmur, he just hums. 

That's how the sun bleeds out of the sky, and how the shadows creep across the apartment floor to claim them, and how Bart, very slowly, runs out of fight. When she's still against him, he curls his arms a little tighter around her, then lets her go. She sways on the spot like the limb of a tree, but she doesn't fall. It's too dark to make out the bloodstains any more. Dirk eases his jacket off and puts it gently around her shoulders.

“I'm going to make us some more tea,” he says, as though there's been no interruption. “That pot's cold.” 

This time, she doesn't watch him – but when he brings the fresh pot over, she's sitting at the table, waiting for him. Curls her fingers around the mug of tea when he puts it down for her, her breath shakily stirring up the pillar of steam that rises from it. 

“Now, I know your name, and you know mine. That's a good place to start. Why don't you choose where we go next? I've got so many questions that you're bound to answer some by saying literally anything at all, so you can't really go wrong.” 

She stares up at him from under her hunched shoulders.

“This smells like flowers.”

“It's made of flowers. Camomile.”

She wrinkles her nose. “It's hot.” 

“Haven't you had tea before?”

“Maybe.” She takes a very small sip, bracing herself as though she's about to be struck. “Hey. Hey, that's pretty good!” And this smile, this unbelievable smile rips across her face like the earth splitting open, and a bandsaw laugh splutters out of her throat, and Dirk leans forward, grinning himself. 

“Camomile's my favourite.”

“Me too, me too.” She wipes at her mouth with the back of her arm, spreads blood across her face from the sleeve of the jacket, absent-mindedly licks it off her lips as she speaks again. “Wanna know something crazy? I can't die either.” 

“Really?”

“Universe won't let it happen. Think it works different, though. Like – check it.” She takes another swig of tea, slams the cup down, then scoops the knife off the ground. Shows it to him, then plunges it into her throat. There's a confused moment, a horrific screech of metal. When it's over, Bart's holding a knife that looks like it's been in an altercation with a blowtorch. The blade's twisted at a ninety-degree angle to the hilt and horribly distorted. The only blood on her throat is the half-dry coating that's been there since she arrived. 

“So stuff goes right through you. But it _can't_ go through me.” She laughs again, that sandpaper/sawblade sound. 

“Fascinating,” Dirk murmurs, eyes glowing. “Why d'you think that is?”

“So I can kill people.”

“Oh.” He frowns.

“You don't like that.”

“No, I don't.”

“It's what I do,” she says indifferently. “What about you? Why d'you think the universe doesn't want you to die?”

“So I can solve cases.”

“What, like some sorta - “ she hesitates - “cop?”

“Not exactly. Well, sort of.”

“Like, someone did somethin' bad, you figure out who it was?”

“Something like that.”

Her eyes gleam. “Then you stick him in the electric chair?”

“What? No.”

“Lethal injection?”

“No, I just – find out what happened.”

The ragged girl looks at him like he's speaking Latin. “Why?”

He opens his mouth, closes it again. “Why what?”

“Why bother finding out? What does it change, you knowin' who did what bad thing? Bad things happen all over the place. Who cares who knows it?” 

“I do,” he says, but his voice is quieter than it was. He takes a sip of tea.

“Sounds crazy to me.”

“Storming into buildings with assault rifles sounds crazy to me,” he retorts. 

She shrugs. “Potato, potato.” 

“What on earth is a pot-ah-to?”

Bart smiles at him again, lightning flash of teeth in the gloom. “We've got a lot in common, Dirk Gently.”

“It seems so.” 

“Which one of is is gonna solve it first?”

“Solve what?”

“The mystery. How to make us die.” She's still smiling. “I gotta kill you. If you wanna stop me, you gotta kill me. Neither of us can die. Isn't it beautiful?” He can't see her eyes any more. Just the glint of her teeth, the strange angle her body keeps listing to. “We both got a case to solve and and a murder to plan. Potato, potato.” 

Dirk stares at her through the dark. “No. I don't accept that. There must be another way. Nobody needs to die."

But she's on her feet, headed for the front door that's still hanging off its frame. He calls her name and she spins around – shrugs his jacket from her bony shoulders and throws it to him. He catches it.

“It's a nice jacket. But I only wear dead people's clothes.” The smile, that smile like the sun splitting an overcast sky. “I'll see you again, Dirk Gently.”

Then she's gone.


End file.
